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The Young Head coinage consists of the issues of British coins with an obverse bust of Queen Victoria first used in 1838 while she was still a teenager. The bust was designed by William Wyon and remained on some British coins until 1887, by which time she was almost 70 years of age and had ceased to resemble her depiction. The young queen sat for Wyon in August and September 1837. Wyon then created his coinage portrait of her, which was approved in February 1838, and production began later that year. Some of the new coins had reverses by Wyon, others by Jean Baptiste Merlen. The new issue produced generally favourable reactions, especially the Una and the Lion reverse used for the five-pound piece. The Young Head portrait was finally replaced by the Jubilee bust in 1887. Wyon's Young Head bust was reproduced on coins for British dependencies and imitated on private issues of tokens. Both the portrait and the Una reverse appeared on British commemorative coins in 2019. (Full article...)

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In the news

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In cricket, the Men's T20 World Cup concludes with India defeating New Zealand in the final (player of the match Jasprit Bumrah pictured).
Mojtaba Khamenei is elected Supreme Leader of Iran following the assassination of his father, Ali Khamenei.
Flooding in Kenya leaves at least 43 people dead.
The Winter Paralympics open in northern Italy.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party and its prime ministerial candidate Balen Shah win a landslide victory in the Nepalese general election, called after the Gen Z protests.

On this day

March 12

Süleyman Demirel

1088 – Odo of Châtillon was elected as the 159th pope of the Catholic Church.
1913 – At a ceremony at Kurrajong Hill, Lady Denman, wife of the governor-general Lord Denman, announced that the future capital of Australia would be called Canberra.
1940 – The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed, ending the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.
1971 – The Turkish Armed Forces executed a "coup by memorandum", forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel (pictured).
2006 – U.S. Army soldiers gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered her along with her family members.

Stefan Dragutin (d. 1316)
William Lyon Mackenzie (b. 1795)
Zhao Wei (b. 1976)
Lazare Ponticelli (d. 2008)

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Today's featured picture

Milk Drop Coronet is a high-speed photograph taken in 1957 by the American engineer and photographer Harold "Doc" Edgerton. It shows a drop of milk striking a surface and forming a crown-shaped splash, captured using Edgerton's stroboscope-based flash photography techniques. A professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgerton had pioneered the use of extremely short flashes of light to photograph the motion of electric motors, later applying the technique to phenomena such as flying insects, bullets, and splashing liquids. He had experimented with milk-drop images since 1932 and produced a similar photograph in 1936. Milk Drop Coronet became one of the best-known examples of high-speed photography, widely exhibited in museums and included in Time's list of the 100 most influential photographs.

Photograph credit: Harold Edgerton

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